Camera Presets and Offsets

Ever since Second Life opened its virtual doors way back in 2003, it’s been saddled with one of the many bad decisions that were made by Linden Lab back then: the camera offsets, on which I’ve written quite a few times in the past. I’m certainly not the first SL blogger to write about it: many others came before me, and the first one to do so was Penny Patton, way back in 2011 with her seminal posts “A Matter of Scale” and “A Matter of Perspective” (archived, as some image links are now dead) and the JIRA she had filed. The default camera offsets greatly affect the way we see our virtual environment, the way we move inside it, the way we perceive the space that’s available to us, and the way we build, scale, and shape things – from our avatar shapes to our furniture and builds.

Before I go any further, allow me to demonstrate the default settings and how they affect the way we experience our in-world surroundings:

A view of an outdoors scene with the default camera offsets. While it doesn’t obscure your field of view, it feels distant and has serious disadvantages once you go indoors.